


Sentinel

by beccabuchanans (vestigialwords)



Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Descriptions of food and eating, Max the dog - Freeform, Other, Semi-Graphic Descriptions of Injury, gender neutral reader
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 11:41:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29401407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vestigialwords/pseuds/beccabuchanans
Summary: It's a quiet evening, just you, a massive pot of stew, a cozy couch, a sleepy dog... and a tired vigilante in need of some creature comforts.Original Prompt:Frank needs a cuddle and some homecooked food or something oh my gosh
Relationships: Frank Castle/Reader
Comments: 1
Kudos: 12





	Sentinel

It’s late. 

It’s late, and you’re tired. 

It’s late, and the thought that it might finally be time to turn in for the night is just beginning to tickle at the darkest reaches of your mind, threading its way through your blood to sink into your bones. Still, a skulking shadow lingers in the corner of your thoughts; a sickly sweet scent in the air hangs like unfinished business. There’s no real reason to stay up any later, except—the notion that your day might not yet be over blooms just below your consciousness, much like the dried flower bulb blossoms at the bottom of your steaming mug of tea. 

You have tomorrow off work, so the late hour is the least of your concerns as you curl up on your couch. It’s a massive, tattered old thing, full of memories and marred hardwood, the cushions flattened in spots from years of use and abuse. You could afford a new one if you really wanted. But every time you go to the store to test new furniture, something feels wrong. Too hard, too soft, too cheap, too expensive. Too itchy, too big, too small, too comfortable, not comfortable enough. 

So the old thing does its duty as the centerpiece of your living room, out of place among the rest of your décor. It’s a lumbering, steady thing that fits into your space perfectly even though by all accounts it really shouldn’t. It’s honest. It doesn’t pretend to be anything more than a sofa, and it does its job without complaint. When your mother comes over, she raises an eyebrow as if to comment on your reluctance to get rid of the ragged thing. 

You shrug off her disapproval every time.

You’re lost in your book, the words on the page playing out a dance in front of your mind’s eye. Your dinner sits comfortably on your stomach, still full hours after eating, a sure sign of a hearty meal. You’re taking a well-deserved break after laboring over your stove for hours—a huge pot of stew that’ll feed you for the rest of the week, you hope. You sip around the free floating leaves in your warm tea as you absently stroke the soft fur behind the ears of Max, the snuffling black and white pitbull who is your only roommate.

Max picks his head up and fixes the window with an intent stare, his ears perking at a sound you don’t hear. A low rumble of warning burbles in his chest before exploding up in a sharp _cluck. H_ e twists his neck to look back at you, expectantly.

“What is it, boy?” 

_Tap-tap-tap-tap!_

A knock against the outer glass of your window, hidden from view by a heavy blackout curtain, five stories up from the ground. Then four seconds of silence.

Max barks again and hops off the couch, the rough fur along his spine standing on end as he alerts to the origin of danger. 

_Tap-tap-tap!_

Again—the signal complete. There’s no danger—well, no danger to _you_.

“Put your hackles down, bud. It’s fine,” you reassure the anxious dog, uncurling yourself from the couch and padding across the room toward the window. You pull back the curtains to reveal your visitor. “—oh, shit.”

The haunting white skull doesn’t surprise you anymore, even though it’s the first piece of information your eyes process against the blackness of the night beyond. You can’t even fathom what that image must look like to others. You don’t imagine there are many people who get the time to acclimate to the ghastly sight, but it’s not the grim _memento mori_ that steals your breath—

Frank stands on the rickety metal of your fire escape. How he managed to climb to the fifth floor without making a racket is beyond comprehension, let alone how he managed to get to your building without getting arrested. His clothes are tattered and torn, ripped apart--some cuts clean, others ragged. His outer coat is puckered, the frayed fibers buried deep into the kevlar of his vest, driven into the strong fibers by the burrowing nails of three—no, _four_ bullets. 

His eye isn’t swollen shut—yet, but it’s a near thing, the flesh of his face an abstract tableau of blood and bruises. The extent of damage is impossible to ascertain while his face is still smeared in tactical face paint, a thin sheen of sweat and grime glistening atop the black sludge. He grimaces, and you know that your face must have twisted into concern.

“It’s not as bad as it looks.”

“Yeah, yeah,” you say, pushing the window up as high as it can go and holding back the curtains so he can climb in without staining them. “I should see the other guy, right?”

He scoffs, one leg through the window into your apartment, his voice rolling into a wry chuckle. “Somethin’ like that, yeah.” 

You sigh and pull the window shut behind him. He drops his duffel bag on the floor and stands in the center of the room. A few moments of silence pass, and then he speaks. “Your place was closer.” 

With Frank, you’ve learned that it’s often more about what he _doesn’t_ say. ‘Your place was closer’ are the words that come out of his mouth. What he _means_ is that he’s tired. He’s sore. He’s hungry. He doesn’t have it in him to hike the last few miles when all that waits for him is the screaming loneliness of his own apartment. He stands in front of you, a mortal man in need of comfort, of a gentle reminder that the world isn’t as cruel as the blood and gore, blood and bullets he finds himself breathing. He’ll never say it out loud, but his body begs for help in a way that his words never could. He leans toward you unconsciously, sharp eyes following your movements as you yank the curtains shut behind him. 

You want to pull him closer to you. You want to wrap yourself around him and guard him from the world that never seems to give him a break. But you also see the hard set of his face and the way he grunts when you take a step closer to him. He flinches when you reach out and brush his hand with your fingertips, recoiling as though you’ve handed him a live wire. His eyes are wild and flashing with the lingering vestiges of bloodshed, and you know you have to step aside to let him in. 

“You know where the old towels are? The First Aid kit?”

His hand twitches at his side. “Yeah.” 

You sigh and let him pass. He favors his left leg as he disappears down the hallway to your bathroom. 

He will call for you if he needs assistance patching himself up. It wasn’t always so. He used to refuse any aid, stoic and serious, until one night he nearly passed out from the pain. You had heard his head crack against the side of the counter and once you’d made sure he wasn’t concussed, you had spent the next three hours chewing him out. The rage in your voice only exacerbated as a soft smile had tugged the tension out of his body stitch by bloody stitch. At first you thought it was ego, a patronizing response to your concern, until you realized he enjoys it—the fussing, the worried admonishment, even though he pretends not to. He misses it, having someone to care about him. So when he needs your help stitching up a wound or cleaning out a scrape—and on one memorable and vaguely sickening occasion, resetting a dislocated elbow—he calls. Today though, he doesn’t. 

Your kit—once just a box of bandages and expired antibiotic ointment—has grown and multiplied since Frank crashed into your life. You hear the thump of it as he drops it on your bathroom counter. Where once you had a picking of all variety of shapes of bandages, and maybe even some gauze for those larger scrapes, now you have sutures and shears, a scalpel, some forceps and an orange bottle of painkillers, the first of three according to the pharmacy order stuck to the side. It bears the name _Peter Castiglione_. Frank assures you it’s all above board, left over from the days when he was slinging a hammer for pennies. The bottle is full.

You hear water running. The sink, then the tub, then the shower. In a few moments there will be steam curling under the crack under your bathroom door, but for now, you turn back to your kitchen. 

The pot of stew from dinner still sits on the stove. It had been almost an hour straight of work when you got home from work that afternoon, but after two more hours at a low simmer, the heaping pile of vegetables collapsed into a hearty mélange of herbs and spices, the scent curling into the tightest corners of your apartment. You’d demolished a bowl or two earlier that evening, and though the soup itself had taken ages to prepare, the work was worth it the moment the first bite melted on your tongue with a tang of spices. 

You can’t say it’s the best pot you’d ever made, but it’s a near thing.

The broth is cool now, room temperature and ready to go into the fridge. You grab a bowl from the drying rack next to the sink and ladle out a massive scoop for Frank and put the rest of the pot away.

You could put the bowl in the microwave and warm it up, but you have no idea what damage he was hiding beneath the heavy canvas of his jacket. He could be in there five minutes—a bootcamp shower and a quick scrub down. It could be an hour or more as he catalogues his injuries and hems the frayed edges of himself. You turn back to the counter and set about tackling the mountain of dishes next to your sink, just for something to do.

Frank emerges from the bathroom soon after in a burst of steam. He was right—it isn’t as bad as it had looked. He has a black eye and a cut on his cheek just above his jawbone that he’s secured with a pair of butterfly bandages. Other than his limp, he seems to have come out relatively unscathed—by his standards, anyway. 

You wonder briefly where the rest of the blood had came from, if it hadn’t been his, before deciding you don’t want to know. 

He reaches into the dishrack at your elbow, pulls out a freshly cleaned spoon, and digs into the bowl, scooping a hearty mouthful down his throat with a hungry growl. 

“It’s cold!” you protest and reach for the bowl, hands dripping with soapy water.

“Don’t care,” he grunts around a mouthful of food and leans against the kitchen counter, his shoulders slumped in relief as he shovels another spoonful of stew into his mouth. “It’s good.”

High praise from a man like him.

You shoo him out of the kitchen to eat as you finish the dishes, smiling as you hear the jangle of Max’s tags as your boy leaps up onto the couch next to his guest. Frank’s voice floats in from the other room, soft and indistinct as he confers with the dog, a gentle debriefing, a demand for security updates from the pooch curled up at his side.

Max huffs as Frank defies his perfect arrangement, standing and rearranging himself on the cushion with a huff. Frank snorts. 

“You keepin’ this place safe?” Frank looks down at the pitbull as he reaches down to give an affectionate scratch to Max’s side. Max’s paw thumps against the couch, a reflex against the targeted attack of Frank’s scritches. Frank chuckles, “Yeah, you are.” 

You glance over at your coffee maker, sitting dormant since this morning, and pull down a pair of mugs from the shelf. You’ve never known Frank to turn down a brew, so you set the ground beans and wait as the thick black liquid trickles down into the glass pot. 

And then—quiet. 

You poke your head out of the kitchen to find Frank slouched down on the couch, one hand resting flat on his stomach, the other flopped over Max. His long legs are spread wide in front of him and his knees bump against the polished wood of your coffee table. The empty bowl sits on the table in front of him, and you lean against the doorway to watch the steady ebb and flow of his slumbering breath.

Maybe just the one coffee then, for you. 

You pour a helping into a fresh cup, and pad across the room as quietly as you can and gently place the steaming mug on the side table There’s a blanket strewn over the armrest of the couch and you carefully unfold it in front of yourself. 

Frank startles when the light woven fabric ghosts his skin, eyes flashing violent in response to a threat. You take a step back to let him have space to come to, to catalogue his surroundings and remember where he is—to remember that he’s warm, and safe, and full. 

His breath evens again, and he holds an arm out to you. You smile and curl into the couch under his arm. He winces as you settle in, a careless hand pressed to his side to readjust your position. Your eyes flash up to his in concern.

“Tell me that’s not a bullet hole.”

“I’m okay,” he responds, but offers nothing more and you sit up to fix him with a glare. “Stop that,” he chides out of the corner of his mouth, admonishing your concern even as he winces with the swaying of his torso as he tries to downplay his discomfort. “Just. Stop. I’m fine.”

“Bullshit, Frank. You don’t come through the window when you’re ‘fine’.” 

He snaps like a spring in the sudden absence of tension, a wild unraveling, uncorking, fevered snarls tearing through gnashing teeth. “What do you want to know, mmm? That I beat a man to death with my bare hands, nothing but my fists and his face? That I just pried four .22s out of my goddamn vest, huh? That a bullet clipped my fucking face tonight? You wanna know all that shit, honey?”

“Don’t be a dick,” you snap back.

His teeth clack as he shuts his mouth and he nods. He takes a deep breath, and lets the fight bleed out of him with a heavy exhale. 

“Yeah,” he grunts. “Yeah, sorry.” 

You don’t tell him it’s okay. It is and it also isn’t, but it doesn’t really matter. 

You don’t think about how you could have no idea that he’s bled out in an alley somewhere until you hear the celebratory announcement across the evening news. A victorious crow that the city has been purged of one of its most dangerous men so that abusers and scumbags can return to business as usual.

Still, he’s good at what he does. Dangerous to be sure, but the scars that riddle his body, the bruises that mottle his skin, the way he favors his left leg as he shifts next to you, all betray the creeping truth that he’s not untouchable. It’s unsettling, the way this man crashed into your life on a tidal wave of violence, but now inexorably woven into the cozy fabric of your life. It shouldn’t work, but it does.

“Hey,” he runs a hand down your arm and pulls you close, burying his nose in your hair. He inhales, breathing in the scent of you, then planting a kiss to the top of your head. “You’re safer the less you know.”

“I know,” you sigh.

You rearrange yourself against the armrest and mirror his gesture, beckoning him with outstretched arm until he leans over and nestles his face against your thighs. His head is heavy and grounding, a pleasant weight pushing you into the soft cushions of your couch. He hums as he nuzzles into the soft meat of your thigh.

Your hands curl into his hair, a gentle stroke. Lately he’s let the strands on top of his head grow out, even as he trims the edges to keep his hair from tickling the back of his ears. The curls flow through your hands, large waves looping and easily coaxed into ringlets around your playful fingers. He groans against it when you accidently tug at a hidden tangle. You rub the tension away in apology, as a low, satisfied rumble born in his chest and vibrating through until he’s boneless and purring in your lap. 

You tug him back by his gentle curls, his mouth agape as he looks up at you with sleepy acquiescence. His throat works around a swallow and you smile gently down at him, “Just, keep coming back, okay?”

“Okay.”

You stare at him, pointedly. 

“Yeah,” he repeats. “Yeah, okay.”

You release your grip on his scalp and his eyes slide closed beneath you. The rhythm of his breathing steadies and slows until he slips beneath the waves of sleep. You reach over to the cup of coffee on the table and take a sip, savoring as the bitter brew slides down your throat.

You don’t have work tomorrow, and Frank needs someone to watch out for him.

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally posted on [my tumblr](https://mandoplease.tumblr.com/post/642872610577956864/sentinel). :)


End file.
